Dutch cardinal: Bishops warned of euthanasia's slippery slope

Dutch Minister of Health Edith Schippers is pictured prior to a 2016 debate in The Hague, Netherlands, about a proposal to legalize assisted suicide for older people who are generally healthy but feel they have led a full life. (CNS photo/Bart Maat, EPA)

OXFORD, England — Recent
increases in euthanasia and assisted suicide deaths among psychiatric and
dementia patients reflect the concerns church officials expressed years ago,
said a Dutch cardinal.

Cardinal Willem Eijk of Utrecht, Netherlands,
said psychiatrist Boudewijn Chabot was right to complain that doctors were now
ignoring legal requirements that a patient requesting death should be "suffering
unbearably and without prospect."

Writing in the NRC Handelsblad
daily, Chabot, a pioneer of the Dutch euthanasia law, said he fully favored "self-determination"
and was unconcerned about the increase in euthanasia deaths. However, he added
that he was alarmed by euthanasia's extension to psychiatric patients, as well
as to dementia sufferers, 141 of whom were killed in 2016, compared to just 12
in 2009.

In an Aug. 1 statement to
Catholic News Service, Cardinal Eijk, who heads the Dutch bishops' medical
ethics commission, said, "Chabot is now complaining about a development he
himself initiated."

"Of course, it's good to
read that an initiator and early advocate of euthanasia and assisted suicide is
now concerned," the cardinal said. "But the Dutch bishops' conference
has warned from the beginning against violating the intrinsic dignity of human
life through euthanasia or assisted suicide, because it is never ever allowable
to violate intrinsic values, and because in doing so you put yourself on a
slippery slope.

"But was it not naive, when
he started this in the 1990s, to suppose that ending life for psychiatric
disorders would remain limited to a few cases only?" the cardinal asked.

The Netherlands became the world's
first country to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide in 2002 and has since
witnessed a rapid increase in related deaths, with 20 now occurring daily,
according to a May report by the Regional Euthanasia Commission.

The report said 6,672 euthanasia
deaths had been registered in 2015, compared to just 150 from assisted suicide,
while 431 patients had been killed without explicit consent.

Cardinal Eijk said euthanasia
had originally been permitted only "at the explicit request of a patient
in the terminal stage of an incurable somatic disease," but had been
steadily extended and was now accepted "before the terminal stage of life."

"When one breaks the
principle that human life is an essential value, one steps on the slippery
slope," the cardinal added. "Dutch experiences teach that we will be
confronted time and again with the question whether the ending of life shouldn't
also be possible with less serious forms of suffering."

In a landmark case in the early
1990s, Chabot was found criminally guilty, but spared punishment, for assisting
the suicide of a 50-year-old healthy woman suffering "existential
distress."

However, in a January 2017
petition, he and 200 other Dutch doctors warned that legal protections were "slowly
breaking down," with many dementia and psychiatric patients being killed "without
actual oral consent."

In his NRC Handelsblad article, Chabot
accused the official Euthanasia Commission of concealing that "incapacitated
people were surreptitiously killed," and said "executions" were
now occurring.

In his statement, Cardinal Eijk
said "ending life without consent" had been made possible by the 2004
Groningen Protocol, which allows handicapped newborns with conditions such as
spina bifida to be killed because of "their perceived future suffering, or
that of their parents."

He said a new assisted suicide
bill, introduced in 2016, would allow healthy people suffering nonmedical
conditions such as "loneliness, bereavement, limited mobility and decline
from old age" to be helped to die by a nonprofessional "assistant-in-suicide."

"Our answer to suffering
should not be to offer euthanasia or assisted suicide, but adequate,
professional and loving palliative care -- of which, from a Christian
perspective, pastoral care is an indispensable part," Cardinal Eijk said.

"When people suffer
unbearably and without prospect from loneliness, a frequent problem in today's
present hyper-individualist culture, we should try to change that culture
instead of offering suicide to healthy people," he said.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide
are also legal in neighboring Belgium and Luxembourg and are deemed "nonpunishable"
in Switzerland. Polls suggest most Europeans favor euthanasia laws with
safeguards.